ZIMA Motors: car Buying Reinvented
A Service design case study
Role: Service Designer
Team: Christine Lee, Hera Miao, Tyler Koke
Timeline: 11 Weeks
Scope:
Service Blueprints
Front-stage/Back-stage Interactions
Customer Journey Mapping
Prototyping
User Research
The automotive industry has undergone significant changes post-pandemic, with shifting consumer behaviors, supply chain disruptions, and increasing digital expectations.
Our team was tasked with reimagining the traditional dealership experience for Zima Motors, aiming to create a more transparent, autonomous, and customer-friendly approach to car buying.
The Challenge
Buying a car remains one of the most significant and stressful consumer decisions. Our challenge was to reimagine how customers interact with dealerships, ensuring transparency, autonomy, and efficiency while maintaining the critical in-person shopping experience.
Objective:
Design a holistic and innovative solution that redefines the in-person dealership experience.
How might we create a more transparent and customer-friendly car buying experience?
Constraints and Opportunities:
Full creative freedom to change core business structures
Permission to experiment with new and emerging technologies
A nearly infinite budget
Design Process
We followed the Double Diamond Model, incorporating Lean UX principles and insights from This is Service Design Doing.
Key Phases:
Discover & Define – Generating assumptions and problem framing
Research - Validating assumptions
Ideation – Generating and clustering innovative solutions
Prototyping & Testing – Building and validating concepts
Refining & Delivering the Solution – Final service blueprint
Discover & Define
We started with empathy mapping to imagine the needs, thoughts, and emotions of current car buyers.
Empathy Mapping
Next, generating assumptions around the current car buying process guided us in the direction of our preliminary research.
Assumptions Grid
After preliminary research, we landed on our initial problem to explore:
Transparency of information between dealerships and consumers
Research & Methods
Desk Research
Compile industry trends and consumer behavior
We started with our initial How Might We and Problem Statements
How Might We…
Create real time transparency so consumers feel like their car buying experience was one of a kind?
Problem Statement:
Vehicle intenders who are planning to visit the dealership need real time transparency of information because they want to feel like their car buying experience was one of a kind and personalized for them.
Utilizing the following research methods, we aimed to validate our assumptions and uncover opportunities & pain points from both car buyers and dealership employees.
In-depth Interviews
Obtaining insights from potential car buyers
Desk Research
We utilized a wide range of sources from:
Academic Research
Online Articles
Business Journals
Multimedia Sources: Podcasts, Youtube videos, Radio
Social Media: Reddit, Facebook Groups, Instagram
In-depth Interviews
We used a mixture of virtual and in-person interviews. These interviews were semi-structured to let us intentionally explore burning questions, but still keep things open ended enough to probe on unforeseen insights.
Our interview guide included:
The Problem Statement
Types of Users
Topics to Investigate
Notes for the Moderator
Script for Informed Consent
Background/Screener Questions
Interview Questions
Interviews validated one of our assumptions. People want to see the vehicle in person before buying; especially when buying used.
We also formed some new observations:
Buyers often went home the day of test driving the car to negotiate from a position of more leverage/market understanding.
Future anticipation of other stakeholder action can delay (or speed) customer’s progress through their journey.
Autoethnography
Mystery shopping to understand the customer experience
To understand the customer experience, we used the mystery shopping technique and visited dealerships looking to buy a hybrid vehicle.
Taking into account dialogue, floor plans & layout, customer service and inventory availability, we were able to grasp an overview of the market conditions.
Auto ethnography helped us discover the problem was far deeper than we thought.
Consumers were intentionally being thrown into interactions with sales people before they had a chance to process and understand the information presented to them.
Non-participant Online Ethnography
We also found youtube videos/comments which gave us more insight into the experience of dealership employees.
Car buying facebook groups and subreddits were communities where users were influenced by word of mouth marketing.
We were able to uncover the following:
pain points of dealership employees
dealership organization and hierarchy
additional processes and stakeholders
Research Key Insights & Takeaways
Non-Participant Online Ethnography
Social media and forums revealed dealership employee perspectives
Desk Research Takeaways:
We saw consumers were craving some sort of “home-field advantage” due to the fear of overpaying.
78% of buyers believe an eCommerce approach provides greater transparency around pricing. Furthermore, users who used online tools to save time across research and financing were more satisfied with the shopping process compared to those who didn’t.
In 2022, 54% of buyers found prices to be higher than expected, compared to only 31% in 2021.
And 63% of these buyers paid more than they intended for a vehicle, compared to 48% the previous year.
Source: Cox Automotive 2023
Car dealership employees also used social media to connect with others and share their frustrations about job security and daily tasks,
Auto-Ethnography
In-Person Shopping is Critical – 71% of American consumers still prefer buying cars in person.
Shoppers Feel Overwhelmed – Many engage in “cram sessions” before visiting dealerships.
Lack of Transparency – Buyers fear overpaying and lack real-time, personalized information.
Final Problem Statement:
Vehicle intenders who plan to visit the dealership need confidence and clarity on their own terms to feel comfortable completing a purchase.
Ideation
Solution Themes:
More Automated Shopping – Reducing dependency on salespeople and more autonomous and independent shopping journey
Dividing Dealerships into Smaller Units – Separating showroom, test drive, and financing for a more digestible brick-and-mortar experience
Enhanced Support & Services – Ensuring a stress-free experience with readily available services and support
What We Avoided
A 100% online car buying experience
Overloading users with more tools and information
5 Whys
Understanding the root cause
In-Depth Interviews
Crazy 8s
Generating more How Might We trigger questions
Using analogies to recontextualize the problem
In-Depth Interviews
Brainwriting
What We Prioritized
A highly autonomous and independent shopping journey
A more digestible brick-and-mortar experience
Readily available services and support
Prioritizing top solutions
Dot Voting & Clustering
Prototyping & Testing
Prototyping helped us see the service from start to end, as this kept us from focusing on the experience with a narrow scope.
Prototyping Methods:
Mood boards & wireframes
Desktop walkthroughs & interactive click-through models
Cardboard prototyping for showroom layout & experience
3D renderings of dealership spaces
Testing & Iteration: User testing sessions revealed that customers valued independence but still needed on-demand human support.
Refinements included hybrid showroom staff & AI assistants to balance automation and human touch.
User Journey
To ensure seamless integration of all touchpoints, we created a future-state customer journey map outlining the experience from awareness to loyalty.
Mapping exercises helped us locate problem areas and further ideate on solutions and additional added features. In the end, we were able to craft a holistic solution that reached our users at a wide range of touchpoints in the customer journey.
Future State Journey Map - Final
Future State Journey Map - Draft
The Solve
We designed an autonomous, yet simple self-service dealership experience
eliminating the adversarial "shoppers vs. dealers" dynamic and giving customers full control over their car-buying experience.
Our final idea of dividing the dealerships into distinct service experiences meant that we were giving customers more autonomy over their shopping habits. We separated the showroom, test drive, and financing experiences while connecting them through a centralized inventory management system, digital mobile app and web experiences.
Taking advantage of omnichannel marketing strategies and touchpoints, we wanted to create an atmosphere where shoppers could participate in a delightful and peaceful shopping experience without feeling pressure to purchase.
Key Features
Showroom Experience – Customers explore vehicles at their own pace using interactive kiosks & mobile app .
Test Drive Centers – Automated self-service test drives with voice assistants and guided routes.
Test drive station kiosk check in
Centralized Digital System – A Zima Motors mobile app connects showroom, test drives, and financing.
Zima Motors: Stephanie’s Model M
We will follow our persona Stephanie in a theoretical journey
Conclusion
Our goal was to create a holistic solution to the new car buying landscape. We delved into service design methods and principles within a Lean UX Framework.
I pursued service design outside of the class by attending the Los Angeles Service Design Jam. It was a great way to further practice the methods outlined in the course textbook, This is Service Design Doing.
Our success in this project was due to:
Our ability to work together to accomplish our collective goals. Each week we performed skillfully, rising to challenges in our design project as well as fun presentation challenges to test our abilities. For this 10 week long course, we presented decks every week ranging from short overviews of our work to full research reports.
Taking advantage of our varying backgrounds and strengths. During our team retrospective, I wanted to highlight how we each trusted one another to deliver quality work. We thought about each other’s circumstances and filled in the gaps when needed. Our team dynamic benefitted from our individual commitment to each other.
Working remotely: allowed us to familiarize ourselves with online collaborative software tools.